Encouraged by Silvio Berlusconi, groups of far-right
vigilantes are patrolling the streets of Italy, awakening fears of a return to
fascism
Gaetano Saya’s staccato voice rises to a near-hysterical
pitch as he points skywards, jabbing his finger in the direction of four giant
marble eagles with outspread wings that tower above the semicircular porticoes
of Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica. “Look! There they are — symbols of the
mighty Roman Empire. They are everywhere!”
Saya is almost spitting with rage as he speaks. For most of
the time that we sit in the sweltering summer heat, sipping espressos in a bar
tucked under the arches of the busy piazza, he maintains his composure. But
when it comes to discussing the uproar caused by the insignia chosen for the
recently formed patrol units of his revived neo-fascist party — which include
the imperial eagle once worn by Musso-lini’s Blackshirts, the camicie nere — he
can barely contain his fury. “The eagles on our badges are Roman, not fascist
emblems. If you ban them you would have to tear the eagle off every public
building in Italy. They are part of our history. Just as Cromwell is part of
yours,” he rants, stroking his clipped moustache.
For the first time since the second world war, Rome is now
run by a right-wing mayor. Gianni Alemanno is not only right-wing, but a former
neo-fascist street protestor, whose supporters flashed fascist salutes at his
victory rally. Alemmano was swept into office in spring last year in the wake
of national hysteria following the brutal murder in Rome of an Italian naval
officer’s wife by a Romanian Roma gypsy. Her attacker stole the few coins in
her purse, attempted to assault her sexually, then left her for dead as she was
returning home along a deserted street in October 2007. The 47-year-old
religious education teacher’s face was beaten to such a pulp that police could
only describe her as of “indeterminate age” before she died of her injuries.
Following sensationalist coverage of the “Roma beast”
responsible for Giovanna Reggiani’s death, vigilante groups sought revenge.
Four Romanians begging in the centre of Rome were beaten and stabbed, while
immigrant shacks all over Italy were set on fire. Since then the country has
found itself in the grip of a growing wave of xenophobia that politicians on
the right are ruthlessly exploiting. Extremists such as Saya, with his
reinvigorated Italian Social Movement-National Right (MSI-DN) party, are also
feeding off the fear of immigrants.
The ultimate beneficiary has been Silvio Berlusconi, the
72-year-old perma-tanned billionaire prime minister. Using the might of his
extensive media empire, he quickly declared that his country was in the grip of
a “Roma emergency” of criminal activity. Many reports at the time wildly
inflated the extent to which immigrants account for crime in Italy, with one
leading outlet even suggesting that “all Romanians harbour criminal intent”.
Overall crime figures in Italy have not risen for over a
decade, yet more than a third of prisoners are now foreigners. Last year
foreigners were charged with 68% of rapes and 32% of thefts.
Concern about immigrant crime levels helped to sweep
Berlusconi back into power in April 2008 on a law-and-order ticket. He
immediately announced the introduction of a “national security package” that
has seen thousands of uniformed soldiers in camouflage combat suits deployed to
stand guard on street corners in Italian cities and towns. The package is
billed as an attempt to crack down on both crime and illegal immigration, now
often depicted as entirely synonymous in Italy, which Berlusconi says should
never be allowed to become a “multi-ethnic society”.
With so much attention focused on the bed-hopping antics of
the flamboyant premier, this ugly undercurrent of racism has been allowed to
spread quietly and insidiously. Berlusconi’s decision to legalise new vigilante
patrols is raising particular alarm.
Waving his hands with a flourish of self-satisfaction, Saya
boasts that thousands of Italians are now clamouring to join the extreme
right-wing vigilante patrols he has called the Guardia Nazionale Italiana, or
Italian National Guard, set up by his party in June. When the National Guard
unveiled its uniform — military-style black caps bearing the imperial eagle,
black gloves, black ties, khaki shirts and armbands with the symbol of the
black sun long associated with Nazism — Italian prosecutors immediately
launched a judicial enquiry into the group. Both Nazi and fascist symbols have
been banned in Italy since after the second world war. But Saya, 52, who has
been investigated in the past for inciting racial hatred, is confident that the
enquiry will be quietly dropped.
“We are just ardent patriots. How can anyone object to that?
We favour ultra-nationalism. We defend our history and we are on the march,” he
says. He blames the “millions of foreigners invading Italy” for the economic,
social and moral crisis he believes his country now faces. “Mussolini was a
great man inspired by a real love of his nation. He was a legitimate leader,
not a dictator.”
Saya waves his hand to beckon a young follower who has been
hovering nearby. Riccardo Lanza is an eloquent 33-year-old stockbroker, neatly
dressed in a suit and striped shirt. The reason the paramilitary uniform of the
National Guard is hanging in his wardrobe, he says, is that “Italians are no
longer in charge of their own country”. He blames the Russian and Chinese
mafias for the “total chaos” in Italy. “They have infiltrated our economy, just
as foreigners have taken over our streets. We need to put a stop to this.”
Unlike in many European countries with long colonial pasts,
mass immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Italy, which
traditionally was more used to the steady emigration of its citizens. Waves of
immigration — first from eastern bloc countries such as Albania and the former
Yugoslavia in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more recently from
north and sub-Saharan Africa — have seen an estimated 3.5m people coming to
live in Italy legally, and another 1.5m illegally, over the past 20 years. The
country is left grappling with the fact that it is no longer monocultural.
Berlusconi recently complained that his birthplace, Milan, “looks like an
African city”.
Political expediency lies behind the creation of vigilante
groups. Berlusconi was helped back into power with the backing of the far-right
Lega Nord (Northern League), originally founded to lobby for the secession of
northern Italy from the rest of the country, but more recently defined by its
opposition to mass immigration. Ten years ago it was the Northern League that
started organising unofficial anti-crime street patrols in towns and cities
throughout the north with large numbers of immigrants. When it became clear
that Berlusconi’s newly formed People of Freedom Party (a loose coalition
between his former Forza Italia movement and the National Alliance, run by the
reformed neo-fascist politician Gianfranco Fini) needed the support of the
Northern League, promises were made about security, including the introduction
of vigilante patrols. The way to tackle illegal immigration, declared Roberto
Maroni, a key Northern League politician and subsequent interior minister, was
to “get nasty”.
The security package, introduced in stages over the past 12
months, also includes stringent new rules making illegal immigration a criminal
offence punishable by a fine of up to €10,000. Children of illegal immigrants
are banned from attending school or receiving health care, and those who
knowingly harbour illegal immigrants face up to three years in prison. These
measures have been compared by leading academics and writers to Mussolini’s
infamous race laws banning Jews from work and education. The Vatican has
described them as “of great concern” and “a reason for sadness”.
Even Berlusconi soon appears to have realised that he had
gone too far in his support of vigilantism. When groups such as Saya’s National
Guard started strutting about in fascist-style uniforms, and violent clashes
broke out between an extreme right-wing patrol group and left-wing opponents in
the Tuscan resort of Massa in late July, Maroni announced that vigilante groups
would have to meet strict criteria before being allowed to start patrolling the
streets. Patrols should be of no more than three people, members should not
wear military-style uniforms, and they should be armed only with walkie-talkies
and mobile phones to alert police to trouble.
But the genie of mob rule had already been let out of the
bottle. Nowhere is this more apparent than among the followers of the far-right
group at the centre of the violence that erupted over the summer in the small
city of Massa.
Massa appears to be a typical Italian seaside resort, with
its neat rows of sunbeds and striped umbrellas. But it is perched on the edge
of the craggy Apuan mountains and has a proud record of resistance. In the
second world war these mountains provided hiding places for scores of
partisans. Some of the most notorious atrocities committed in Italy by German
SS forces were carried out in the area, including the massacre at Sant’Anna di
Stazzema, a small village where 560 civilians, mostly women, children and the
elderly, were rounded up and shot and their bodies burnt.
So when Stefano Benedetti spins me a yarn about how the name
for the vigilante patrol group he and other right-wing extremists set up in
Massa came to him by chance, it is clearly laughable. The group is called Soccorso
Sociale e Sicurezza (Social Help and Security), and its initials, SSS, are seen
as highly provocative.
Benedetti, a travelling salesman well known for playing
fascist anthems on his car stereo and hanging a portrait of Mussolini at home,
is the only right-wing city councillor in a municipality controlled by the
left.
“People call me a Nazi and a fascist. But I am just doing my
civic duty,” he argues, explaining how his SSS patrols began to operate at
night earlier this year, touring areas of the city frequented by immigrants, on
the lookout for trouble.
“There are too many foreigners in our community and they are
turning to crime, stealing cars, breaking into houses, becoming violent.”
When SSS members congregated outside a bar close to where
left-wing union members were staging an annual solidarity march on the night of
July 25, fighting between the two factions sent tourists scurrying. Three
policemen and two demonstrators were admitted to hospital; left-wing protestors
staged a sit-in on the high-speed rail link.
As news of the emergence of the SSS started circulating
among the small immigrant and Roma communities in and around Massa, local
officials reported that foreign-born parents were starting to pull their
children out of summer activity programmes. A visit to one ramshackle Roma camp
of makeshift huts and caravans scattered along the railway tracks between Massa
and the neighbouring town of Carrara soon reveals why. “The Italians have
always hated us. But until now they have left us alone most of the time,” said
one 23-year-old father of three boys, who would only be identified by his first
name, Ercoles. “These patrols say they will make the streets safer. But now we
are afraid to let our children out of our sight. We’re afraid if we let them go
to local swimming pools or beaches, they will be attacked.”
“Massa has a reputation as the sixth safest city in Italy,”
its mayor, Roberto Pucci, explains wearily. “But the way these right-wing
patrols operate is to create a false sense of fear, create a perception that
there are more problems than there are, then portray themselves as the only
ones interested in and capable of solving them.
“We are a young democracy, and what is happening here should
be taken seriously,” Pucci concludes. “It is not a pleasant situation.”
Pucci has now banned the SSS from operating in Massa, and
many left-wing municipalities throughout Italy are expected to follow suit. But
Benedetti and his followers vow they will resume their patrols. “They have
forbidden the SSS from operating. So we will just change our name and reform as
a different organisation,” says one supporter. “What we are doing is within the
new law. No one can stop us now.”
This defiance is echoed by Gaetano Saya. Although the
National Guard has delayed starting its vigilante patrols as a result of the
judicial investigation, he says they will circumvent the rules banning uniforms
by reclassifying themselves as a “party militia”.
“The guard will become the operational arm of our party,
accompanying our politicians wherever they choose to go on the streets. That
they can’t stop,” says Saya, who claims to have the backing of a group of rich
industrialists who funded a surveillance helicopter the group recently bought.
The prospect of vigilante patrols mutating into political
militias, as existed under Mussolini, has many Italians alarmed, especially in
the wake of government measures such as the decision to fingerprint the
country’s entire population of 150,000 Roma gypsies, some of whose families
have been in Italy since the Middle Ages. The fingerprinting programme quickly
got under way in some cities, but has since been watered down to exclude
children, following human-rights protests. But such programmes have already had
a desensitising effect. The bodies of two young Roma sisters, who drowned while
swimming off a Naples beach in the summer of 2008, were left draped in towels
for hours on the sand as bathers carried on picnicking and playing Frisbee.
In Padua, heartland of the Northern League, local
authorities erected a three-metre-high steel barricade around an immigrant
community held responsible for bringing prostitution and drug-dealing to the
area. The barrier has since been removed, but in the nearby city of Ardo the
mayor posted a bounty of €500 for anyone turning in an illegal immigrant. In
some areas of the north, where vigilante patrols are now expected to flourish,
the Northern League has also proposed that kebab shops and Chinese restaurants
be banned from city centres because they are deemed “incompatible with the
historical context”.
In recent years many Italians have felt uncomfortable about
the proliferation of prostitutes from eastern Europe and Africa plying their
trade openly in streets across the country. And the rise in organised crime and
gang violence has had a wider effect. Earlier this year anti-immigrant feeling
flared in Rome after a 21-year-old Italian woman was gang-raped and her
boyfriend brutally beaten by a group of five Romanians.
But with the country’s plummeting birth rate and ageing
population, many parts of the economy would find it hard to survive without
foreign workers. Last year a government report on immigrant relations showed
that 42% of Italians recognise that immigrants are essential to the economy.
But this has not prevented a series of vicious attacks on foreigners in the
past 12 months. These include a homeless 35-year-old Indian being beaten and
set on fire at a seaside town near Rome last February, and before that an
immigrant from Burkino Faso being beaten to death with an iron bar by a Milan
shopkeeper who claimed he had stolen a packet of biscuits.
Marco Rovelli, an academic from Massa who has written about
Italian immigration, attributes the emergence of vigilantism and the success of
political movements like the Northern League in fostering xenophobia to the
country’s own history as a poor nation of emigrants until the middle of the
last century. “When Italians see foreigners living in the sort of poverty they
have only relatively recently left behind, they feel afraid. For some it is a
painful reminder of their own past and makes them wary of losing the prosperity
they have achieved.”
Beneath the government’s manipulation of national insecurity
lies another agenda, warns a fellow academic. James Walston is professor of
international relations at the American University of Rome. “By focusing
attention on immigrants — and that’s the intention of the vigilante patrols,
though it is never said — and creating a feeling that the streets of Italy are
unsafe and blaming foreigners,” he says, “Berlusconi is diverting the spotlight
from the real problem in this country.”
The real problem, he believes, is organised crime and the
mafia. “But any mention of the mafia has largely fallen off the agenda, partly
because of the prime minister’s own links with it.” Walston cites the
conviction of Marcello Dell’Utri, one of Berlusconi’s closest advisers, on
charges of conspiracy with the Sicilian mafia.
In large parts of Italy a significant proportion of the
population still pays protection money to local mafia groups every day. Some
fear that, in the south particularly, vigilante patrols will soon fall under
the control of the mafia, consolidating their hold and leading to more
bloodshed.
Last September a hit squad of the notorious Casalesi clan
gunned down six West Africans near Naples in a turf war over prostitution and
drug-dealing. Several months before that, thugs of the Camorra clan unleashed
an orgy of violence against Roma camps in Naples, setting fire to caravans,
beating up occupants and driving them from their homes after rumours circulated
that a baby girl had been abducted by a gypsy woman. The response of the
government’s interior minister, Maroni, was simply to shrug and say: “That is
what happens when gypsies steal babies.”
Little wonder, then, that the Italian judiciary — condemned
by Berlusconi in the past as a “cancer on society” — and police unions are very
critical of the premier’s new security package, including the legalisation of
vigilante patrols, for “creating confusion” and diverting resources from
official law-enforcement agencies.
Patrols approved by local municipalities will also be
entitled to limited funding. The police say that exactly where this money ends
up will be hard to track — as a meeting with two burly vigilantes in Milan soon
confirms.
Vincenzo Scavo does not bother to introduce me to his
heavily muscled associate, whose mobile phone rings constantly with the theme
tune from The Godfather. Scavo is too busy complaining.
Until the beginning of July he ran a group in Milan called
the Blue Berets that was paid more than half a million euros to conduct
anti-crime street patrols in city trouble spots such as the railway station and
the Metro system. This was until it was discovered that Scavo held a membership
card for the neo-fascist MSI-DN party run by Gaetano Saya. The contract was
suspended and Milan’s mayor immediately ordered an investigation into the Blue
Berets.
Scavo, a tattooed private-security guard who is originally
from Sicily, explains in hurt tones that the only reason he had a party
membership card was because he had been contacted several years before to
provide private security for the party. He was never hired and claims he had no
contact with the party after that.
“For this our good work, our mission, has been stopped,” he
complains. The contract, he insists, was only part of the work of the Blue
Berets. “We also had volunteers running shopping errands for the elderly in
marginal areas of the city, near gypsy camps and immigrant communities where
Italians are afraid to walk the streets. Now our citizens will face danger
again and live in fear of foreigners.”
Take a walk in some of the areas Scavo identifies as trouble
spots, such as Via Padova to the northeast of Milan’s city centre, and it
becomes clear that it is the immigrants who are afraid. “A lot of people in
these patrols are just racists who use them as an excuse to be abusive to
foreigners,” says 39-year-old Isabel Ceveno from Ecuador, who has lived in
Italy for 13 years.
Many immigrants I approached in this area with a group
called the City Angels, a humanitarian organisation that helps the homeless, no
longer dare voice their real concerns. “They used to speak openly to us. But
now they are far more cautious. Some think we are part of these new vigilante
patrols,” says Mario Furlan, the founder of City Angels. “Whereas we go on the
streets to look for people to help, the classic vigilante is someone who goes
out looking for an enemy.”
“The patrols are just going to create more agitation on the
streets,” says Jona Qamo, a 27-year-old from Albania. “Wouldn’t it be better to
help immigrants fit in rather than spy on them?”
Qamo has a point. The attitude of the Italian authorities at
all levels has been to assume that people would just muddle through and accept
immigrants in their midst because Italians traditionally have a laid-back
attitude to life.
“But the presumption of Italian tolerance is not enough,”
says Walston, “when you have between 5 and 10% of the population made up of
foreigners.” What is needed, he argues, is “real leadership” in promoting
integration. “But that is the opposite of what is happening.”
Jean Leonard Touadi, born in the Republic of Congo and now
Italy’s first black MP from sub-Saharan Africa says: “It is very hard for
Italians to admit they are racist, since they don’t associate themselves with
that part of Europe with a long colonial history.”
Touadi has lived in Italy for three decades and has seen a
marked rise in racism in recent years. “You can’t say we are living in a
fascist regime. But some of what is happening now is very dangerous. With all
the problems this country has, not least with the mafia, to single out
immigrants as the top priority for law enforcement and throw them to the mercy of
vigilantes is clearly just making them scapegoats.”
